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Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Long version: If you haven’t already seen Belladonna of Sadness, the 1973 anime about eroticism and witchcraft in medieval France, I might not necessarily recommend it outright. If it’s the kind of movie you’d need to see, you’d probably already have seen it. There’s no question that Belladonna is beautiful; it truly is a work of art. However, it may lean more toward art than entertainment, because in many sections of it, there’s not actually any animation happening. You’re just watching the camera pan over a beautiful drawing or watercolor rendering of Jeanne, the film’s central character.

I decided to take the film’s most colorful and most animated parts and edit them into a kind of Belladonna of Sadness supercut, and as soon as I did that, Goldfrapp’s “Hairy Trees” just kind of suggested itself as the ideal musical pairing. What you see below is something I find aesthetically pleasing but also a really misleading trailer for the film, as I purposefully excluded many of the still frame scenes, all the scenes where the sentient penis of Satan is a character and then also the scenes of sexual violence. Like I said, this movie is not for everyone. And yes, I see the irony in taking a work of erotica and essentially spaying it. However, as far as this video being a first in a little series I’m doing about weird animation, I think I’m off to a decent start.

Heads up: This video is NSFW as a result of animated boob.

In case you’re curious about the racier aspects of this film, I’m including below two of its big sex sequences: one represented Jeanne’s induction into witchcraft and the other the effect Jeanne’s liberation has on the villagers in her town. If the video I cut was a soft NSFW, I’d say these two sequences are an incredibly hard NSFW, not just for nudity but also for psychedelic, grotesque imagery the likes of which you may have never seen anywhere else.

Enjoy or also maybe just watch it concernedly, depending on your disposition.